On Mon, 28 Feb 2000, Nate 'Dr. Octagon' Gelbard wrote:
> We have recently purchased a Meiko CS-2 transputer from an
> OSU auction. more info is here http://www.grawk.net/~gelbardn/shark
> but its basically an array of 16 sparc-10 2-proc machines.
>
Sounds interesting :)
> The management node is a dual TMS-390z55 w/ 32mb of ram, and a cgsix.
> It boots into OpenProm v2.8.128. A 1 gig scsi HD is attached via
> the an NCR sbus scsi controller.
>
Does it have an ethernet interface over which you could also boot?
I'd be inclined to try to load the NetBSD/sparc boot program
first. If it runs OpenPROM you may be able to 'Just Boot'
NetBSD/sparc on the scalar node.
> The other nodes (vector nodes) are basically the same machine, but
> w/ 2 extra vector Fujitsu uMP vector processors. From the serial console,
>
> *** HyperSPARC Vindaloo Vrom 4.1 [08-Dec-93] ***
>
> ? candis dlfile dlstat dm ecc
> echo fakedl go led mprobe peek
> pil poke port quit reset sidsum
> tm version
>
> It seems that I can dlfile via the serial connection, and 'go' to
> jump to 0x000000000
>
> Would the kernel be the file i should upload? Or do I need some sort
> of bootstrap first?
>
This is the method for booting the additional nodes?
> Has anyone every seen one of these machines? We're missing the
> disk set from the management console (hacked solaris 2.4). I'm
> more interested as running these an indiviual sparc-10 machines
> rather than use the elan backplane (40mb/sec between machines),
> and use the ethernet for any parallel fun we do.
>
That sounds feasible - have you tried tracking down any hardware
docs on it?
> I would eventually like to open these machines up to the opensource
> development community for sparc/SMP work, or any other projects.
Excellent plan :)
David/absolute